Joanna Lumley: 'Patsy is a strong woman. She has to be. She hasn't eaten since 1973'

Bond girl, fashion icon, renowned stage actor, Gurkha champion: Joanna Lumley has had a wonderful career. But it is her portrayal of Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous that is stamped on the nation's consciousness. She talks about the new episodes of the show

Perhaps, in retrospect, it was a mistake to mention Eleanor of Aquitaine's nipples to Joanna Lumley. And yet it seemed irresistible. After all, in the 1968 film version of James Goldman's Broadway play The Lion in Winter, Katharine Hepburn makes great play of them during Eleanor's so-called desolation monologue.

Picture the scene: it's Christmas, 1183, at the Château de Chinon. Eleanor, who has been imprisoned by her husband King Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole) since 1173, to be let out only for the holidays, has spent most of the action sparring with him and his hotsy-totsy mistress, or taunting her sons, compost-smelling John, historically neglible Geoffrey and future Lionheart, Richard. Now, near the end of the drama, her hopes for rehabilitation have come to nothing and, at 61, she has nothing to look forward to. "I've lost again," Hepburn's Eleanor says in that snooty Bryn Mawr-polished Connecticut accent. "I'm done for this time." And, then, in an odd non-sequitur, Hepburn takes up a gold chain, holds it up to her breasts and says (to the jewellery): "I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children."

I recite these lines to Lumley, who looks at me with imperious blankness. She's impeccably polite, but there's something in her fixed look that says: how did this chump get past security? I feel like former immigration minister Phil Woolas did when he contradicted the Lumley Line at a Gurkha press conference. We're sitting backstage at London's Theatre Royal Haymarket where, in 90 minutes, she and Robert Lindsay will be playing the leads in Trevor Nunn's revival of Goodman's medieval Christmas from hell. She's coolly elegant in full makeup, black trousers and V-necked T-shirt, while I, damp and flustered from the rain, seem to have brought five plastic bags filled with books and notes supporting my unworthy nipples thesis, like some inept petitioner admitted to court against everyone's better judgment.

I rummage for the relevant document (Fool! It was in the Morrisons bag, not the M&S one) while Lumley kindly rubs my knee, surely a breach of court protocol, but a personal career high for me. I look up, expecting her to be making throat-cutting gestures and mouthing "Abort! Abort!" to her PR minder. Instead, she says: "But there isn't a desolation monologue, darling." There was in the film. "They must have tarted the dialogue up for the film. It was never in the play, sweetie."

Lumley admires Eleanor. "She was the most powerful and enlightened woman of her age, and even now she is always popping up on lists of the 100 most influential women. A great linguist, she was also brave – she rode all the way to Damascus, an amazing feat for a woman in those days. She also introduced the notion of courtly love."

True, Eleanor of Aquitaine was an exceptional woman, but did she have a career as extraordinary as Lumley's? Of course not. Did she ever appear in an ad for Nimble bread? Did she ever appear as a knitwear model for a short-sleeve sweater under the headline: "Young and gay, simple to knit"? Did she ever play a Bond girl? Was she ever caught in flagrante between Brian Rix and Leslie Phillips in a three-in-the-bed romp during a west end farce called Don't Just Lie There, Say Something? Did she ever have an iconic helmet of a hairdo when playing Purdey in The New Avengers? Or stick a revolver in a stocking top? Did she ever mend Time as an interdimensional operative in a baffling sci-fi drama called Sapphire and Steel? What, when you think about it, did Eleanor of Wherever do for the Gurkhas? Was she awarded an OBE? And could she consume endless toxic substances and yet remain aged 39 for ever like Ab Fab's Patsy Stone?

All these amazing achievements explain why the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts is wrong in his sniffy review of Lumley's performance in The Lion in Winter. "She is seldom anything except Joanna Lumley," he complained. "She never steps inside her character. She performs but seems to lack – or to have lost – the selflessness required for true acting." What Letts didn't seem to realise is that when we go to see Joanna Lumley at the theatre, we go to see her first and Eleanor of Aquitaine, whoever she is, second – if at all.

Lumley as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion In Winter. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Hepburn played Eleanor of Aquitaine when she was 61; Lumley is tackling the same role at 65. And yet she seems to be too young to be playing the queen in the twilight of her influence, if not intelligence, not just because a 61-year-old queen in 1183 would be about 100 in today's reckoning, but also because Lumley is at the height of her powers.

In her just-published picture book of an autobiography, Joanna Lumley Absolutely, the blurb reads: "Joanna Lumley is not only a star of stage and screen, but also a National Treasure [their caps], loved and admired by all." Of course that's bonkers, but sometimes one thinks that such is Lumley's stranglehold on our culture that the merest scepticism about the uncrowned queen of British celebrity would get you hung, drawn and quartered. Which is why Letts must be punished.

We're meeting because Lumley is starring in three new episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, in which she plays ageless, deathless, creaseless but never drugless, fagless or boozeless Patsy Stone. It's 19 years since we first saw her as Patsy and seven since the sitcom was last broadcast. Two episodes will be shown over Christmas, and the other sometime in the new year.

Lumley's BBC minder has warned me not to blab the identity of one guest star or detail a shocking storyline. So all I can say is that I was surprised that Ab Fab isn't yet Obsoletely Fatuous. Although the humour is sometimes insufferably broad, co-star and writer Jennifer Saunders' scripts are sharper than ever.

There is even loose talk about an Ab Fab film. True? "Well, Jennifer said so, on the Graham Norton show. It's entirely up to her. But sometimes she will say things like this in order to spur herself to write." If it happens, would you want to play Patsy? Lumley emits one of those faux-plebby porcine snorts that Patsy gives when Eddie's said something funny. By which Lumley means, surely, that she would produce a revolver from a stocking top and shoot anyone who stood in her way of that film role repeatedly and deservedly in the face. "It's got to be all the Js together," she says, meaning: Jennifer Saunders (Edina Monsoon), Julia Sawalha (her daughter), June Whitfield (Edina's mother) and Jane Horrocks (Edina's assistant Bubble).

In any case, who else could play Patsy? Perhaps only Meryl Streep and even then Streep could hardly do justice to some of the new lines Saunders has written for her, such as Patsy's comment on the riots: "Nothing wrong with a bit of extreme shopping"; or her sneer when someone suggests she take fewer drugs: "Have you seen the price of methadone? Cheaper to buy crack."

The role of Eurydice Colette Clytemnestra Dido Bathsheba Rabelais Patricia Cocteau Stone, aka Patsy, is, lest we forget, substantially Lumley's creation. Ab Fab is the mutant offspring of a French and Saunders sketch about an ageing alcoholic, drug-abusing PR agent desperately trying to stay fashionable (and in part modelled on fashion PR Lynne Franks) and her strait-laced, speccy bookworm of a schoolgirl daughter. There was initially no Patsy. Where did she come in? "Patsy sprang fully-formed like Medusa from the head of whoever it was." Zeus. But that's not quite right: Patsy was initially stillborn. When, in the early 1990s, Lumley turned up for a read-through of a scene for the AbFab pilot, she couldn't make the character sound the way Saunders was hoping for. As she recalls in her autobiography: "Jennifer can be very silent; on this occasion I felt so inadequate that I went back home, rang my agent and said: 'Get me out of this.'"

The agent, as you may have noticed, did not. Instead, Lumley writes, she, Saunders and co-collaborator Ruby Wax invented a character "largely based on a cartoon version of me. We invented Patsy's past and I furnished her with having been a model in the swinging 60s. Jennifer is 13 years younger than me, so she was a baby when all that was going on. But she's like a Hoover, she's like a scavenger. She's a bottom-of-the-pond feeder, she goes around listening and picking anything she wants from anywhere. She's a wizard."

But Patsy isn't Lumley. "Absolutely, darling," she says. "Patsy and I are the same coin but I hope I'm the obverse side of Patsy."

Lumley as Purdey in The New Avengers. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ITV

Lumley is posh: born in Srinigar in 1946 in the last days of the Raj, she was a convent girl and graduate of the Lucie Clayton School of modelling. Where did Patsy come from? "Don't you remember the episode when Eleanor Bron gave birth to her in Paris? Eleanor said: 'Take that away, and bring me another lover.' She scattered bastard babies all over Europe like a garden sprinkler. Patsy's Eurotrash."

Lumley looks at me appraisingly. "You're too young to remember Peter Sarstedt." Sweet, but au contraire, I'm word perfect on Sarstedt's 1969 No1 hit Where Do You Go To My Lovely?, whose sixth verse goes: "Your name is heard in high places/You know the Aga Khan/He sent you a racehorse for Christmas/And you keep it just for fun, for a laugh ha ha ha."

Patsy, Lumley says, is just like the song's subject. "She would have hung out with some quite scandalous and cool people. When Sarstedt sings 'Where do you go to my lovely, when you're alone in your bed?' he could be singing about Patsy. There's a tragedy in her life, though." As I recall Patsy had a sex change in Morocco in 1971 but her penis dropped off for reasons that we may never learn. That, though, is not the tragic flaw Lumley means. "She has nobody to look after in her life. Edina has the family, and Patsy has nothing but Eddie. There's a kind of tragedy in the longing she has. She says to Saffy she wishes she were the grandmother to Saffy's child."

But Patsy isn't just tragic – there's something marvellous about her: "Oh heavens yes! Absolutely. She's a strong woman. She has to be strong to survive. She hasn't eaten since 1973, she lives on God knows what and she'll still be ready to party even when she's in incontinence pants."

Time for my second faux pas of the interview. I ask Lumley if we will ever see her film about the trials of ageing, Late Bloomers, in which she stars opposite Isabella Rossellini and William Hurt and which they filmed in London last year. In it, Lumley plays Rossellini's "grey panther" activist friend, making acerbic swipes at attitudes to ageing. Lumley looks away into the middle distance. I've clearly upset her. Extraordinary: she's so programmatically unflappable that I imagined that would be impossible. After a silence, she says crossly: "Late Bloomers. Is that what it's still called?" According to the Internet Movie Database, yes. "But I wrote to the director [Julie Gavras] who is French telling her that that would be a terrible title in English. She clearly doesn't know that in English bloomers means big pants or mistakes." For its French release the film was entitled Trois fois Vingt ans and for its Spanish release Tres veces 20 años – both meaning three times 20 years, so why Gavras went for the English idiom is anybody's guess. But why is Lumley so upset? After all, the term late-bloomers has a currency away from pants and mistakes. The film has yet to receive a British release which, given the reviews, is not a surprise.

In an attempt to placate Lumley, I produce her autobiography from a bag and ask that she sign it. It's a fantastic book, especially if you like reading captions about other people's hair problems, which fortunately I do. My favourite is on page 104 for a photo in which she appears sitting on the bonnet of a blue Rolls-Royce beside her first husband, the co-creator of Are You Being Served? and 'Allo, 'Allo, Jeremy Lloyd. He's done up like Austin Powers in velvet suit and snakeskin belt, with his arm around a swinging 60s icon who is having a bad-hair day. The caption reads: "My hair was brown at this stage, dyed by me, as ever, and frankly rather beastly."

"We were only married for eight months. There wasn't time for us to get bitter and there was no money to fight over." She has been married for 25 years to British conductor Stephen Barlow, but stays in touch with her first husband, one JL ringing the other to catch up on news and to lament, no doubt, that the sitcom in which they both starred after their marriage broke up, the Jilly Cooper-scripted Awfully Bad for Your Health, Darling, has been airbrushed from history. "There are no tapes of it anywhere," says Lumley sadly.

It's time for Lumley to get ready for tonight's performance. What next for her? "I have no career path. There are no roles I long to play. I just want to do good. I get sent a lot of scripts but there are not a lot of good writers around."

After Eleanor of Aquitaine, perhaps she will return once more to Patsy. Clearly she hasn't finished with her globally successful alter ego. Or as she puts it in her book: "There are more stories to be told and much more chaos to be wrought. I hear Jennifer's voice calling and my hand reaches for the mirror: let the backcombing begin."

Absolutely Fabulous is on Christmas Day at 10pm and New Year's Day at 9.40pm on BBC1; The Lion In Winter is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 28 January